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21 January 2018

COMMENT: Android Go - What You Need to Know

Android is the world's
most widely used smartphone operating system. Today, more than
two-thirds of smartphones run the Android operating system, making it
the dominant force in the world of smartphones. But this widespread
use has led to the fragmentation of the versions installed on active
devices. Right now, Google doesn't officially support anything
released before Android 4.3 (JellyBean), yet there are still more
than enough devices that are incapable of running a newer version of
the popular operating system.

Now Google
seems to have found a solution to this problem at least for part of
Android users having older or less capable devices. It has released
Android Go, a lightweight version of Android 8.0 Oreo, that will be
capable of running on devices with 1GB of RAM or even less. The
company presented the project at this year's Google I/O conference
and has started to roll it out to OEMs a few days ago.

Supported
hardware

At the time this article was written,
there were just a handful of chips that were confirmed to support
Android Oreo (Go Edition). Qualcomm has let the world know in a press
release that its "low- and mid-tier" Qualcomm Snapdragon
chips will be "ready to be used by device manufacturers shortly
after the latest version of Android (in this case Android 8.1 Oreo )
is released to the Android Open Source Project". "Entry-level
devices are the gateway to the internet for many people, and we want
to make sure everyone has a great experience when they use these
devices," said Sameer Samat, vice president of product
management, Android and Google Play. "We’re excited that
Android Oreo (Go edition) will significantly improve storage,
performance, data management, and security."

MediaTek, a
manufacturer of affordable smartphone processors, has also announced
that its entry-level chips MT6739 (quad-core 1.5GHz), MT6737
(quad-core 1.1-1.3GHz) and MT6580 (quad-core 1.3GHz) all support
hardware running Android Go.

Apps

Google
has created a set of its own apps to work with Android Go. Apps in
the G-Suite will be able to better use the devices' memory and will
take up far less storage space compared to regular versions. Google
Assistant will also be able to run on devices with less than 1GB of
RAM. Besides, there will be new Google apps to go with the new
version of the OS: Google Go, Files Go, and others. The phones
running Android Go will also have an exclusive version of the Play
Store on them, with a storefront adapted to the needs of
lower-performance devices and recommendations and featured apps that
will work best on a handset running Android Go.

While Android
Go is unlikely to be released on older CPUs (Qualcomm's Snapdragon
800/801 didn't even receive the Android 7.0 update, despite being
perfectly capable of handling the new operating system) it will allow
more affordable handsets to perform better and benefit of the
increased security of Android 8.0, even if in a limited fashion. More
information about how the operating system behaves itself will surely
become available next year.

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